The Agency of Children
From Family to Global Human Rights

Uses the idea of children's agency to survey the main issues in childhood studies.

David Oswell (Author)

9780521843669, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 20 December 2012

312 pages, 2 b/w illus.
23.5 x 15.5 x 1.7 cm, 0.62 kg

'A hugely significant reworking of the concept of agency with respect to children and childhood. Essential reading for all involved in the field.' Valerie Walkerdine, Distinguished Research Professor, Cardiff University

The idea of children's agency is central to the growing field of childhood studies. In this book David Oswell argues for new understandings of children's agency. He traces the transformation of children and childhood across the nineteenth, twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and explores the dramatic changes in recent years to children's everyday lives as a consequence of new networked, mobile technologies and new forms of globalisation. The author reviews existing theories of children's agency as well as providing the theoretical tools for thinking of children's agency as spatially, temporally and materially complex. With this in mind, he surveys the main issues in childhood studies, with chapters covering family, schooling, crime, health, consumer culture, work and human rights. This is a comprehensive text intended for students and academic researchers across the humanities and social sciences interested in the study of children and childhood.

Part I. Introduction: 1. Introduction
2. Agency after Ariès: sentiments, natures and spaces
Part II. Social Theories of Children and Childhood: 3. Modern social theories: agency and structure
4. Partial and situated agency
5. Subjectivity, experience and post-social assemblages
Part III. Spaces of Experience, Experimentation and Power: 6. Family and household
7. School and education
8. Crime and criminality
9. Health and medicine
10. Play and consumer culture
11. Political economies of labour
12. Rights and political participation
Part IV. Conclusions: 13. Conclusions.

Subject Areas: Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography [JHMC], Sociology [JHB], Age groups: children [JFSP1]